Meissonier, his life and his art . theon. IJut this proposal,which was at first favourablyreceived by the administrationof the Section of Fine Arts, wasfinally rejected, and he thereforehad perforce to await anotheropportunity for the realisationof his project, an opportunity which never presented itself This was, indeed, the fate of several otherprojects especially dear to Meissonier, such, for example, as his idea,—astrange one enough,—of taking in hand a large canvas of Samson slaying thePhilistines, for which he had collected a good deal of material, and made anumber of studies. It is matt
Meissonier, his life and his art . theon. IJut this proposal,which was at first favourablyreceived by the administrationof the Section of Fine Arts, wasfinally rejected, and he thereforehad perforce to await anotheropportunity for the realisationof his project, an opportunity which never presented itself This was, indeed, the fate of several otherprojects especially dear to Meissonier, such, for example, as his idea,—astrange one enough,—of taking in hand a large canvas of Samson slaying thePhilistines, for which he had collected a good deal of material, and made anumber of studies. It is matter for greater regret that he never completed whathe called his Napoleonic Cycle,—a series of scenes reproducing the mostcharacteristic of Bonapartes career. Of these five scenes only two,—thesubjects known as i8oy and i8i^,—were completed, with what brilliant successis well known. Failing the pictures he did not live to cany out, we haveMeissoniers own words to tell us what the completed work would have been, or. STATLETTE OF MEISSONIER BV GEM[TO. 03 .S8 APPENDIX at least, what was the conception he proposed to illustrate.^ Among the notesof the masters conversation taken down each day b}- her whom a secondmarriage had made the companion of his last jears, and who survives him todevote herself to his memory, we find a curious sketch of the programmeMeissonier had drawn up for his own guidance. From this, as from many otherfragments of these Notcs, we learn that Meissonier never decided upon theexecution of anj work without profound stud) of the meaning he sought toconvey. Before tracing a line on the canvas, he had made the subject his ownb) exhaustive mental anah-sis. But as regards all that pertains to execution, totruth of forms or effects, to a rigorous precision of st)-le, he never, to the very ,6) rr^^
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, bookidmeissonierhislif00meis
